The Work of Staying
Micah Donovan settled into Red Willow Valley the way water settles into dry ground, slowly and without asking the earth to hurry. Each morning he rose before the light touched the San Pedro and went to whatever work Chief Noche's people put before him, and each morning he asked first.
"Where would you have me?" he said, not, "What needs doing," as if the valley were his to survey. Old Tomaso, who kept the corrals, took to answering with a grunt and a pointed chin. Fences first. Then the irrigation ditch that carried river water to the bean fields, choked since spring with silt and fallen cottonwood limbs.
He mended fence with wire drawn tight and posts set deep, his cavalry training plain in the straightness of his line. He dug the ditch in the hard hours, shirt dark with sweat, boots caked, and when the younger men teased his blistered hands he laughed and held them up like evidence.
"City hands," said Luis, the chief's nephew, in Apache, then in English for courtesy.
"Scout hands," Micah corrected, and Luis grinned and taught him the word for blister, which Micah repeated until the camp children dissolved into giggles at his accent. He learned greedily and without shame. Thank you. Please. Water. Horse. Friend. The word for morning. The word for the red willows that gave the valley its name and leaned over the river in green curtains even in the dry months.
He learned slower words, too, by watching how they were used. The word for a guest who had not yet become kin but was no longer a stranger. He heard it applied to himself one evening at Tomaso's fire and felt it land in his chest like a warm stone.
The camp watched him. That was plain, and he did not resent it. A man who had been given until the rains to earn the right to be chosen could expect to be weighed. The women weighed him hardest, as was proper. They noted that he took only his share at meals and a smaller share when the meat ran short. They noted that he never entered the healing lodge's yard uninvited, never watched Naya work over a patient.
Naya watched him most carefully of all, and what she saw unsettled the defenses she had built across nine years of being discussed.
He never asked about her shame. That was what the valley called it in its kind voices and Cedar Flats called it in its unkind ones: the daughter who could not bear children, the fever at seventeen that had closed her body's future, the three suitors who had come with horses and blankets and gone away again when the truth was told them. Garrett Sloane had told it loudest, in a store, as if her worth were a price he had refused to pay.
Micah had been in the valley six weeks and had heard it all β a camp was not a convent, and gossip traveled on woodsmoke. Yet he never once approached the subject sideways, never offered her the soft, pitying look that well-meaning people had given her since she was seventeen, as if she were a cup with a crack in it. He did not treat her as less. He did not treat her as brave, either, which was pity wearing a finer coat.
He treated her as the chief's daughter and the valley's healer, which was to say as a person whose competence was a fact like weather. When old Marta cut her hand shelling corn, it was Micah who carried the woman to the healing lodge β and stopped at the yard's edge, and waited to be waved in. When the children brought him a nestling fallen from the willows, he carried it to Naya and asked, "Will you show me what to do?" and held the tiny, frantic heart in his palms exactly as she directed, neither fumbling nor taking over.
"You do not ask many questions," Naya said to him once, at dusk, when he brought firewood to her lodge and set it down outside the door, as always.
"I ask the ones that are mine to ask," he said.
"And the others?"
"The others are yours to tell or keep." He touched his hat brim and went away into the blue evening, and Copper followed him without a lead rope, limping still on the foreleg he had favored since the ride that saved this camp in the blizzard winter.
Naya stood in her doorway long after he had gone. In nine years no man had ever left a silence of hers unfilled, unprobed, unpitied. She found she did not know what to do with a respect that asked for nothing. It frightened her more than Garrett Sloane's contempt ever had, because contempt she knew how to refuse. This, she was beginning to understand, she might one day have to learn how to accept.
Behind her, her mother's kettle muttered on the fire. Above the valley, the first stars came out over the river, and the willows whispered in a wind that smelled, faintly, of rain.